Sharing Work Zone Effective Practices for Design-Build Projects

Chapter 1: Introduction

Design-build projects are becoming more prevalent as agencies seek to speed up projects to leverage resources through growing use of public-private partnerships, accelerated project timelines, and contracting out design work. While the principles advocated by the Work Zone Safety and Mobility Rule—such as impacts analysis and transportation management plans (TMP)—still apply to design-build projects, there are some adjustments needed to address differences between design-build processes and traditional design-bid-build processes. There is a need to explore issues related to design-build projects and to produce additional best practices and guidance to aid project stakeholders in the differing processes associated with design-build projects. For instance, some states have procedures that have been working very well for them that should be captured and shared.

This project constitutes the second phase of previous work to develop these resources. The specific objectives of this project are to identify and share best practices and guidance on work zone management, quality assurance, and TMP development for design-build projects. This information is packaged within this report as a series of lessons learned, best practices, tools for developing TMPs, and sample forms and checklists. The report presents these resources in the following five chapters, described briefly below:

• Chapter 2: Lessons Learned and Best Practices in Design-Build Projects. This chapter presents bulleted lists of lessons learned and best practices in design-build projects, organized around a variety of pertinent issues and subjects in design-build processes.
• Chapter 3: Transportation Management Plan Development Tools for Design-Build Projects. This chapter presents development tools for the development of TMPs in general as well as for the development of TMP components including Temporary Traffic Control Plans, Traffic Incident Management Plans, and Public Information and Outreach Plans.
• Chapter 4: Quality Assurance Tips for Work Zones in Design-Build Projects. This chapter presents a concise, bulleted tip list for managing work zones in design-build projects.
• Chapter 5: Quality Assurance Checklists for Work Zones in Design-Build Projects. Building on Chapter 4, this chapter presents a series of sample inspection checklists to aid design-builders and owners/agencies in conducting quality assurance (QA) for work zones in various phases of design-build projects.
• Chapter 6: Additional Checklists to Support Design-Builders and Owner/Agencies. This chapter presents an additional series of sample checklists to support design-builders and owners/agencies in various processes of design-build projects. In particular, several checklists in this chapter pertain to items and issues related to the TMP.